Cycling in Waterloo Region

[danbrotherston]

Frankly, I've said it a few times but I strongly believe that the engineers who designed that should lose their licenses.

Not sure if it's the engineers that are at fault. More or less the brain trust, or lack of, with government officials. What I would have liked was for the LRT to choseb 1 side of the street it was going to function on, either the centre, or in the right lane. Not both. Obviously this criss-crossing, especially at King and Moore is causing serious issues.

What I would like to know is if at some point if someone had asked the question: "How will this affect cyclists? Will it have a negative effect on them?" For some reason, I have to believe this question *was* asked, and brought up, but was ignored. It's like the hydro corridor beside Fairway Rd. How did that get missed? I know I brought it up with an MPP, but nothing came of that, clearly.

In this case it absolutely is the engineers. Region staff identified this issue before, and provided a mediocre, but sufficient mitigation. In a rare case, region staff idd i in fact bring up the question, and did in fact, propose a solution--as you point out, most of the time, this does not occur, as it did not with the hydro corridor.

The engineers responsible for actually building the design were instructed to design a MUP along the tracks. However, their design is beyond incompetent, it does not in any way achieve the goals, and they should be liable for the harm that results from their professional negligence.

Having the LRT remain on one side or the other would also have been an acceptable option, I don't know why they did not do it that way, and I don't really care, the point remains that I, as a resident, was satisfied this issue was handled acceptably by the proposed design, and it is the incompetence of the engineering which has caused it to be a problem.

As I've said before, a lot of the LRT's design problems are due to it only being in preliminary design before it was handed over to the contractors to complete, and there being little to no public input into that process. If the general thrust of GrandLinq's plans had been open to public comment, many of these points could have been resolved before cast in concrete.

So, I am not sure I agree with this, and for several reasons, but first I will play a little devils advocate. If the standard public engagement processes were followed, chances are, the LRT would not be running today, those processes are incredibly lengthy and impose enormous delays on projects, and it certainly would also have increased the costs, and would have introduced additional opportunities to kill the project at a political level. Whether it was cancelled, or merely delayed, I can see why it makes sense to go with the process we used.

It is a shame that the engineers involved did not set reasonable priorities, or build competent designs for the parts they were entrusted to do so on. Ultimately, this does stem from a regional prioritization of vehicles over all other modes, they followed regional designs and specifications, and were aware of what designs would be acceptable to regional staff (I believe there was back and forth with regional staff on design issues during the process). There is plenty of blame to go around.

That being said, I do not believe a public process would have helped much (maybe it might have solved some things, but not all) a few reasons why:

The Traynor issue was in the original design that was sent to the public, and according to folks here it was raised and ignored. The type of people who were impacted by it, are generally left out of public consultations to a significant degree. More, just general policy of the region is that these paths are unofficial and irrelevant. Again, the root problem was not the LRT, but the intention of the region to expliclty not design for pedestrian access. The informal paths were a workaround that people used because they needed to, but explicitly against regional (and city) policy.

So many parts of the design were simply broken because the region is broken, public consultation on a specific project isn't going to change that....

Regional PICs aren't really....meaningful. I'm going to be blunt here, I don't think regional engineers care about PICs. They may use it a little to gauge public response to issues, and decide what types of proposals to put in front of council, but I doubt very much they listen to specific issues much. For them, I believe it is a hurdle they must jump over, not an opportunity to improve their designs.

Now I have no doubt this would be incredibly hurtful and unfair to some regional engineers, but this is my perception after visiting numerous PICs and having this experience. Yes, they may feel differently, and some may even act differently, but this is my experience broadly.

Finally, straight up, the LRT was too politically charged to have a rational conversation about with the public. If they hosted more PICs, there would just be thousands of comments of screaming people screaming that it's evil...any useful comments would be utterly lost in that noise.

I don't have solutions to the problems of public engagement, it is a hard problem and some in our region do it much better than others...the regional transportation department is not one of those organizations that does it better.